Item Class Descriptive Flexfields

User-defined attributes are used to configure additional attributes to support your organization's requirements. Descriptive flexfields appear in the user interface as additional information and can also appear in search results tables.

If you need to add only shallow and small numbers of individual data fields, consider using descriptive flexfields. For example, you may want to use a descriptive flexfield to capture different address fields (represented as context-sensitive segments) for different countries (represented as contexts). Address fields, though they may differ in number per country, are usually all at the same hierarchy level. For table layouts, if you have data that require a different context segment value per row, and that context segment value has different respective context-sensitive segments (in terms of type and number), then you must use descriptive flexfields, not extensible flexfields.

You cannot group attributes using descriptive flexfields. For example, if you wanted to define a maximum CPU speed and a minimum CPU Speed for an item, you have to specify an attribute called Maximum CPU Speed and another called Minimum CPU Speed. You couldn't have a grouping called CPU Speed and have two child attributes called Maximum and Minimum.

With descriptive flexfields, you can define many contexts for an object but you can display only one context at a time. For example if the context value is a State, then the context segment called "Capital" would have different values depending on the value of the context. If the descriptive flexfields have only one context, the context selector can be hidden in the user interface. You can define descriptive flexfields on items, structures, catalogs, categories, new item requests, and change orders.